Textiles
Late at night I exchange texts with one of my oldest friends, who among other things spins, dyes, and weaves. I send her progress reports on my Christmas projects, lately the puppet stage panel paintings, and she shows me what she's quilting or weaving. Last night she sent these ravishing pictures of a cotton/silk fabric dyed with indigo. She didn't spin the thread, but she did weave them on one of her astounding number of looms. She's trying to figure out how to line them with velvet and use them in a protective drape for a concert grand.
My husband alerted me to this story about woven fabrics excavated in Turkey that appear to date from at least 6500 B.C. The fiber is oak bast. Bast is a fiber found on the inner surface of the bark or outer material of "dicotedonous" flowering plants, which are about half of the flowering plants, I take it. Wiki tells me that people have extracted bast fibre from "flax (from which linen is made), hemp, jute, kenaf, kudzu, linden, milkweed, nettle, okra, paper mulberry, ramie, and roselle hemp." My weaving friend adds yucca.
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11 comments:
She's trying to figure out how to line them [cotton/silk fabric] with velvet....
For ignoramuses like me, why would that be hard to do?
Eric Hines
It might be because they are dissimilar materials. In addition, if it's just sewn around the edges, the material is liable to bunch up?
My wife makes quilts. The front, batting and the backing have to be sewn across the middle as well as around the edges, or else the batting will bunch up into a big lump at one end of the quilt.
At least that's my theory.
That's a beautiful pattern.
Lovely. Amazing what can come off a loom!
BTW, nice work on the puppet frame- I was taken with the right hand panel, the motif and execution is nearly identical to a painting I have, done around 1916. It is a heart shaped panel in chip carved cabinet, carved on the inside "Soldat Belge, 1916", with the mans name. A memorial, presumably.
The front, batting and the backing have to be sewn across the middle as well as around the edges....
Yeah, but that seems an easy thing, if tedious, to do. Or just take a single stitch at intervals across the field, so the sewing doesn't show. The fact that an expert doesn't see that as a solution, though, suggests that sewing the lining on isn't that simple. Maybe it's to do with the lining being velvet?
Eric Hines
I think the challenge she was worried about was how to form an irregular shape in the most efficient way, because this fabric was difficult to weave--something about the fine cotton wanting to break--and she doesn't want to waste the material.
Maybe fasten on the velvet lining first, and then shape the combined fabric, with the velvet lending its strength to the totality?
Will she sew a beading (a stuffed tube) along the seams between the part covering the flat of the piano and the vertical parts hanging down the sides?
Eric Hines
I didn't mean she's afraid the fabric will break now, only that there is a limited square footage, because it was so difficult to weave. She needs to figure out an extremely efficient way of cutting out irregular pieces, a space-filling puzzle.
Tangent: Virginia Postrel wrote a nice history of textiles. Enough minutiae to be interesting, and not so much as to dull.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52686790-the-fabric-of-civilization
That is some beautiful fabric, and I really like the subtlety of natural dyes.
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